Professor of Religious Studies Mark MacWilliams will be an associate research fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture at Nanzan University in Japan for 10 days in January of 2012. MacWilliams is involved in a long-term project with a colleague at the Institute, working on a book dealing with modern Japanese religion.

The Institute was recently awarded a Kaken Grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science to pursue the internationalization of religious studies and research in the history of religions, with a focus on modern Japan. The project covers four main areas: modern Buddhism, the definition of Shinto, the history of religious studies in Japan and interreligious dialogue.